Big Names, Money Equal A Dull `Sphere'

February 13, 1998|By ROD DREHER Film Writer

Everybody's talking about how the spectacular success of Titanic may set off a spending spree in Hollywood, with studios green-lighting incredibly expensive movies left and right. Let their accountants take them to see Sphere. This dreadful thing should serve as a cautionary tale as to how big money ($100 million) and a big director (Barry Levinson) and big-name stars (Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson) can add up to a big zero.

Based on a 1987 Michael Crichton novel, Sphere follows a team of scientists to the bottom of the ocean, where the U.S. Navy has discovered the remains of a giant spaceship, which crashed 300 years ago. Working from an undersea lab, the team _ including a psychologist (Hoffman), a biochemist (Stone) and a mathematician (Jackson) _ explores the ship's interior. They discover two puzzling facts: that the spacecraft is American, and it's carrying as cargo a giant, golden, liquidy sphere _ which appears to be alive.

After a typhoon cuts the team off from the ships on the surface, naturally the sphere gets nasty. One of the crew (Queen Latifah, of all people) is mauled by malevolent jellyfish. A giant squid knocks the lab around. Sea snakes strike. Jackson may or may not be possessed. All we know is that it's somehow related to whatever's living in the sphere.

The action scenes are erratic and fitful, with Levinson all thumbs at building and sustaining tension. The dark, sterile confines of the underwater lab aren't much to look at, and the plot is a mess. Some films _ L.A. Confidential, to cite one _ keep you on the edge of your seat by unwinding just enough mysterious twists to keep you intrigued. Sphere throws so much confusion at you it becomes annoying, and finally not worth trying to sort out.

Compounding the problem are miscast actors: ``biochemist Sharon Stone'' _ think about that. They really go off the deep end when it appears that whatever's menacing them has something to do with their own character flaws. Screenwriters Paul Attanasio and Stephen Hauser haven't written believable or interesting characters, so it's hard to care much what happens to them.

The explanation for all this nonsense turns out to have something to do with original sin, and something Franklin D. Roosevelt once said. It's actually a pretty decent premise for a sci-fi movie. This is not it.